DREAM VESSELS #36: Sirens(Angels sing while the world burns) FIRST DRAFT
from a collage by Marsha Connell
by Corinthian columns, and stone angels
singing from opposite ends of the spectrum,
would it divide the secret heart of light?
Would the redwoods know the strength of greatness?
Would city is rise Up like teeth, or tombstones?
Would the the galleons ships set sail
in the reef clouds over the oil wells?
Would light know how to fragment,
and the holy stones, our smokestacks,
echo in the voices of children
singing from the plateau, or from the tableau?
Scrolls carved in stone, ex lap us.
One boy clutches his robes as he sings,
while others stare off into space, hand on head.
Arms around shoulders, they said
Do the men on the ship hear them,
do they sail to their doom,
to the New World, tabula rasa?
The sirens of the New World. Próspero’s cave.
They say nothing compares to the purity
of soprano voices of young boys.
Castrati, they kept their voices for their art,
the art of the church, the art of dogma.
In the cathedral of the forest
a plague of cities spreads its disease.
Everything rising up towards God,
the trees, the columns, the ship’s masts.
everything rises. The boys, the smokestacks in the cities
while the oil derricks pump dark blood
from the earth, from under a cloudy sky.
Sky and sea are one thing.
Maybe we are the lost continent of Mu.
Looking up, singing from the fabled Alexandrian library,
from a time when sequoias circled the earth,
final remnants of another age in the New World.
I cannot help but think of Christianity
when I see the redwoods, their longevity
sparks something within me.
Seedlings when the Demotic hymns were sung,
when the cities along the Adriatic
took root among the the stones.
It is said the Aegeans became sailors
because the land was too rocky to till.
I cannot ameliorate these oil wells
in beautiful skies at the same time.
We are ships traveling through
while a chorus of angels sing a delusion of faith.
Summer of 1992
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